Kickers Matter More Than Quarterbacks
OK that's not true but at least I have your attention
While deep-diving into the latest NFL offensive stats for my last piece, I stumbled upon a stat that really stood out. Amidst a season of offensive struggles, NFL kickers were quietly smashing records, hitting their marks at an incredible rate. They’ve nailed 86% of field goals this year and 98% of extra points - all time highs. The strat struck a chord - kicking has always fascinated me because it’s a clear marker of evolution in football. Offense and defense are a seesaw - is one getting better or the other getting worse? But kicking, like free throws in the NBA, offers no entanglement problem.
You really see this in Ivy League football1. The first time I watched a game on television, I was struck at first by how much it looked like… well, football. I expected a product far worse but it looked pretty similar. You could watch the game and almost convince yourself the players matched up to big-league counterparts—until the punter came on. His kick fluttered in the air and went about 35 yards. That’s 30 worse than an NFL kicker and 15 worse than a good college one. It’s not too far off from what I can do, and I barely got playing time on my youth soccer squads.
Anyway, this backdrop is what makes the evolution of NFL kickers all the more striking. Kickers have constantly pushed the frontier of what’s possible: as the game has gotten harder, they’ve gotten even better. They’ve twice gotten so good the NFL had to change the rules to hold them back – and each time, they’ve just continued getting better.
And here’s the craziest thing: they’re more responsible for the increase in points scored than the quarterbacks.
OK, before we get to that claim - a bit of history. Back when football was closer to its rugby roots, kickers were more of an auxiliary part of the team. It wasn’t rare to see a lineman or even a backup quarterback hastily putting on the kicker’s shoes. The goal? Boot the ball as far as possible, with little regard for the finesse and precision that we associate with kicking today. The 1960s brought a revolutionary change, thanks to Pete Gogolak and his soccer-style kick. This wasn't just a new technique; it was a paradigm shift. Kicking evolved from a brute force afterthought to a fine art of precision and strategy.
The journey of the NFL kicker is one marked by constant adaptation and relentless improvement, best exemplified by the evolution of the extra point. This first graph chronicles this evolution across three distinct eras, each shaped by its own set of rules and challenges. The first shows kickers steadily improving in the early part of the Super Bowl era (orange line), until the NFL decided to move the field goal to the back of the end zone – lengthening all kicks by 10 yards in a bid to incentivize offenses to shoot for touchdowns over field goals. Kickers steadily mastered this challenge (blue line) until in 2015, the league said again this was too hard – pushing the extra point from about 20 yards to 33 yards. Kickers saw accuracy dip, but shrugged and went back to the lab (gray line). This year, they’re back up above 95%. Move the kick back again, I say.
But that’s not even the wild part. Look at the second graph here. This brings into focus the remarkable strides made in field goal kicking. With every era at the NFL, kickers have simultaneously had to take harder kicks and gotten way better at them. As the dots on the graph stretch further out, representing the decades marching forward, we witness an unprecedented expansion of kickers' capabilities, challenging the very physics of their craft and altering the strategic calculus of the game. For perspective, kickers this year are nailing a greater percentage of their kickers from 50+ yards out than kickers hit at all distances in 1977.
It’s just a beautiful graph to look at, a well-earned sign of human mastery over our material world. At basically every field goal distance, kickers have gotten steadily more and more accurate with time. There’s no fun linear relationship as with Moore’s law in computing (which predicts humanity shall double its computing power every two years), but we’ll call the inexorable march of kicker progress one anyway. Let’s go with Groza’s Law, named after the first kicker to be able to make kicks from 50+ yards.
The impact of Groza’s Law shows up subtly but in the most important place: the scoreboard. In 1967, teams made just 49.2% of the 2.0 field goals they tried every game. In 2023, they are attempting only slightly more - 2.1 - but making 85.8%. If teams in 1967 used today’s kickers, they’d be making nearly a full extra field goal per game. It translates to 2.2 extra points a game, which (as we covered last week) is huge in the NFL.
What I’ve done below is chart three things. The first is the overall change in points per game across the Super Bowl Era. The second is the impact of Groza’s Law – i.e. if I took the kickers from each year back to 1967, how many more points would offenses score? Since kickers only get better over time, their impact on offense increases basically every year. The other line is the difference - how much value did the offenses add?
Other than one year in 2020, kickers have essentially been responsible for all offensive improvement in the NFL. Another way to say this: if kickers hadn’t improved from 1967, offenses would have peaked in the first year of the Super Bowl era.
So put some respect on those names. Kickers more than deserve it.
Bless all of you who don’t immediately get this reference.